Well, lo and behold, President Trump was finally shamed into backing himself out of a corner rather than tripling down.
President Donald Trump said he plans to sign an executive action on Wednesday that would end the administration’s policy of separating migrant families crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, abandoning the president’s previous stance that only Congress can fix the problem.
“The Republicans want security and insist on security for our country. And we will have that,” Trump said during a meeting at the White House with lawmakers and officials. “At the same time we have compassion and want to keep families together. It’s very important. I’ll be signing something in a little while that’s going to do that.”
He added that he hopes his action will “matched by legislation.”
How bad was this fiasco?
This freaking bad:
Michael Cohen, President Trump’s longtime confidant and former personal attorney, has resigned from his post as deputy finance chair of the Republican National Committee’s Finance Committee, sources close to the RNC told ABC News.
In his resignation letter to Ronna McDaniel, the RNC chair, Cohen cited the ongoing special counsel investigation as one reason for his departure. ABC News has reviewed the email.
“This important role requires the full time attention and dedication of each member. Given the ongoing Mueller and SDNY investigations, that simply is impossible for me to do,” he wrote.
Cohen also criticized the administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the southern border, the first time he’s distanced himself from the president.
“As the son of a Polish holocaust survivor, the images and sounds of this family separation policy is heart wrenching,” Cohen wrote. “While I strongly support measures that will secure our porous borders, children should never be used as bargaining chips.”
I’m not sure of the timing, but Trump’s decision will at least improve his odds of keeping Cohen from flipping purely out of moral outrage at his former boss’s cruelty towards children. And that’s not nothing, given the stakes for the president.
Of course, while it’s a good thing that the government will stop making the problem worse, they have a very huge cleanup ahead of them. I’m assuming pressure to find and reunite thousands of children with their families will be unrelenting. And this is a significant strategic defeat, too, because Trump was hoping to use the moral catastrophe he created as a way to force Congress to give him an immigration bill that would be to his liking. That’s over now.
The White House remains hopeful that any legislation to end family separation will also include at least some of the president’s other priorities on immigration. But officials are ready to accept a more narrow legislative fix if they cannot win bigger concessions from Congress — an apparent recognition of the political risks of letting the uproar drag on.
These people of conscienceless idiots and they are rapidly destroying the morals of a good forty percent of the country that appears willing to follow wherever they lead and rationalize anything they do. But, at least here, they finally went too far.
Way too far.
Too far even for Michael Cohen.
Martin, what are your thoughts on this take from Josh Marshall?
Eleven dimensional chess by Trump, or just crazy speculation by Josh?
Thanks. I’d like Martin’s take on this as well.
Seems at least somewhat plausible.
More than plausible. It fits very neatly into the Republican strategy of vilifying all branches of government except the President.
Remember – Trump did not come up with this “fix.” It very much has other republican’s fingerprints on it. And since there is no way in hell Trump had anything to do with drafting the EO, we can assume a lot of thought went into crafting it.
In the Marshall piece, “Trump” is being used as a metonymy for Stephen Miller.
damn.
How long did it take you to find metonymy?
I learned it in high school. For some reason it really stuck with me.
Maybe you can reverse it too.
nope. Not a word.
People suffering from severe Narcissistic Personality Disorder are incapable of thinking even a couple steps ahead. DT wanted a way to take the heat off him now, to save face. Period.
Throwing it in the court’s face is a temporary fix at best.
Have any of his Executive Orders survived the meat grinder? He never provides guidance for any of them. ICE, Border Patrol et al will scramble to comply, but they will fail massively. Meanwhile the visuals will continue, the heat will not abate.
I agree with that. However some are sadistic that is they appear to derive some kind of pleasure, or something, from the distress of others. If that’s the case with Mr Trump (I think it likely) he will not respond well to any loss of this narcissistic supply.
As long as they adore him on Fox News and he has his little rallies across the country, he will never run out of narcissistic supply.
Reversing Trump’s fiasco is looking to be 2nd only to his original policy.
DHS, ICE & HHS don’t communicate. That’s according to them, not a supposition. There is no mechanism set up to reunite the parents and children which are now scattered to the 4 winds of this continent. The kids did not get ID bracelets that are bar coded to match their parents. There seems to be virtually no accounting set up and followed to ID the prisoners much less reunite them.
ACLU & private attorneys are arriving and working with the kids, this is looking to be even worse for Trump than the Muslim ban 10 fold.
It’s an unconscionable mess.
These kids, all of them, are pretty much guaranteed to be messed up in small to big ways for the rest of their lives.
Great. Just great.
And likely a lot of these kids won’t ever be reunited with their parents.
But according to Laura Ingraham, as a “liberal do-gooder (clearly the VERY WORST thing I could ever be),” I’m just supposed to “fix” this all on my own.
Family blog, family blog, family blog….
Trump is totally on track to become the Pete Wilson of the whole country.
He is, in fact, exceeding what Wilson did by several orders of magnitude. There’s going to be a reaction to all of this that will be deep and long-lasting.
And we’re barely into the 2nd year…
This wasn’t about fixing anything. This is about trying to force a news cycle change.
To 63 million reprogrammable meatbags:
Trump signed an EO that they didn’t bother to read; therefore HE solved a Democrat caused problem.
Any further issues are EVERYONE ELSES fault because he signed an EO that said only what Sean Hannity et al. said it said.
Any further press coverage about this, much less trying to blame him for any fall out from it, is Liberal Media Bias/Deep State Conspiracy because he solved it by signing an EO that Sean Hannity et al. said fixed the problem.
And so on and so on.
DHS & ICE don’t communicate? I thought ICE was part of DHS.
I daresay we’ll never know how many of the babies and toddlers have been and still will be sold into the adoption black market.
This is all kabuki. Let’s not forget the Trump Doctrine; “I will be treated fairly, or else”.
Trump will not believe he has been treated fairly, and this is simply an attempt to stop the questions. This has gone on for weeks, yet reached a crescendo a few days ago when these questions started getting asked;
“Where are the toddlers, where are the girls?”
They have no answer to those two questions, or at least no answer they can give the public. Something very terrible has happened in the background. Almost certainly people want to quit…probably because they suddenly noticed they can no longer have `fun’.
Trump is going the be enraged that he had to pretend to back down.
“Where are the toddlers, where are they girls?”
.
. . . being asked and you have no answer (to my knowledge or that I have seen, anyway) . . .
This is a crime against humanity. Who will bring this man to justice?
“Where are the toddlers? Where are the girls? ” When will they be reunited with their families?
This entire operation has been so cruel, hamfisted, ill-concived and racist that they will never be able to answer that question.
You kidnapped kids and deported the parents. Jailed the parents. “Detained” the parents.
Where are the parents? Where are the kids? How does a mother get her baby back?
Where the fuck are they?
Crimes, crimes against humanity,
Those kids could end up in foster homes or adopted or deported or even servants for the elite. You might even call it human trafficking. There’s money to be made there.
I would not be surprised.
When I was younger I lived in upstate NY. There were a number of families in the area that took in foster children, the more the better. Some owned farms and so they could put the older kids to work and still get paid.
A good friend of mine has been a foster mother for many years. Currently she has a severely disabled foster she’s had since he was a small child; he’s in his mid-twenties now and still (and always will be) incapable of functioning independently. Both she and her two daughters have wound up adopting one or more of the children that came to her. Her fosters have always been the most difficult cases, children with physical and developmental disabilities, children taken from horrific abuse and neglect situations. Under her loving, supportive care they’ve blossomed and healed far beyond what the experts ever expected.
And she took them in part because she needed the extra income. Never made a secret of it, never tried to pretend it was some magnanimous saintly endeavor divorced from financial realities. She loves kids, loves taking care of them, but yes, it was always also the money.
So, yes, there are those who abuse the foster system purely for financial reasons, but even among those who do it for the money, sheer mercenary greed isn’t always the whole story.
This atheist considers her about as close to an earthbound saint as I’ll ever encounter, and hopes she’ll go someday to the God she quietly, pragmatically, and humbly believes in.
Trump’s decision will at least improve his odds of keeping Cohen from flipping
Who knows the real reason why either Cohen or Trump did what they just did. Many possibilities and much intrigue.
But Cohen calling out Trump on the migrant kids? Didn’t see that coming. Let’s hope the motivation was common decency. Don’t laugh.
I think the opposite. I think Cohen’s comments indicate that he’s almost definitely going to flip if he hasn’t already.
The thought process that I believe has occurred goes like this “If he cares so little for those children no matter how bad it looks, how little does he think of ME and MY family?”
Cohen is up to his eyeballs in Russian mafia. He knows very well he and his family could be exterminated any time. I think he saw the little kids and it dawned on him that no one is coming to save him.
This is not over. The donald just signed some okay doke EO. This just throws the mess into the courts. The court of Roberts who can’t issue any decision that that actually decides something. I want the name of the organization that the donald gave 1/2 billion to. I want to see the contract. I want names and photos of the CEO and everyone managing this program. Have we not learned there is no reason to trust the word of the donald?
I agree. This is not over by any stretch of the imagination. I think enough of the public has learned not to trust anything he does. The EO has Ryan and McConnell’s prints all over it. They gave him a temporary way out. SCOTUS is almost done for the season.
I agree with the poster who says Cohen is going to flip. He’s been the means by which DT has knifed so many others in the back. His blinders are off now; he’s not going to cover for DT any more.
Meanwhile, all summer long, the images from the concentration camps will leak. You know more than one child will die in their custody.
News of more people being indicted will surface.
Top all that with the GOP trying to take away the protections from the ACA re: pre-existing conditions, and the disastrous tax bill. It is going to be one UGLY election season for the GOP.
. . . in the “off-season” on emergency appeals and such. IIRC, it’s a single Justice (or perhaps Occupant Gorsuch) who grants, e.g., a temporary stay (which I think has no precedential weight) until the full court can take it up.
No, you’re just being crucified (metaphorically . . . alas) by all decent humans everywhere, even getting the normally Worse-Than-Useless Corporate Media to briefly pause their both-siderist false equivalence to call cages “cages”, policies “policies”, and even, occasionally, lies “lies”.
the R’s are selling us a dummy – predictably and consistently easier for them to lie than to tell the struth.
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the hatred behind the eyeballs of every ICE officer is as steely a gaze you gonna get from a `general’
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No change in policy until the joint chiefy weefies get of their chair shaped butts and confront this clear and present danger. we are not watching a movie and no I don’t want to binge watch the human atrocities blooper reel.
You write:
Why on earth would you assume that? About the only thing “unrelenting” in this whole Trumpian saga is the effort to pump his image up as far it will go without exploding. He’s just letting a little hot air out of the balloon, now. What “efforts” do get made will simply be done to deflect dangerous criticism from his own base. Say what you will about the Trump voters, one thing is crystal clear. For most of them, “family” is foremost!!! He’ll hustle them back into his corner with some self-serving speeches and a few bureaucratic double shuffles. Once one or two news cycles go by whatever “efforts” have been made will turn out to have been purely prophylactic.
He doesn’t care about “people”…only about his own image and the power that he can accrue through its inflation.
Later…
AG
P.S. You must admit…Trump manages his toxic hubris very well.
So far…
He’ll pop a cork eventually, though.
Hubris knows no permanent limitation.
Bet on it.
Nemesis approaches closer and closer with every ego-inflated success.
Watch.
Bring popcorn.
It’s going to be one hell of a show when it goes “Bang!!!”
Bet on that as well.
Better to bring a hazmat suit, kevlar, and some concrete barriers. Mr Trump has an MO, & a lot of experience – when his stuff goes bang, he walks away clean as a whistle but everyone else around him is devastated. That would be you & me.
True.
But karma like that eventually catches up.
Let us pray it does this time, too.
AG
Good thing Godwin suspended* Godwin’s Law!
*or actually, more like disavowed the popular misrepresentation of it
It’s not just Gruppenfuhrer Miller—58% of Repub respondents in some poll were willing to tell a pollster they approved of Der Trumper’s Kiddie Koncentration Kamps. Sadism AND border “security”, an irresistible combo for the American “conservative”! Are the little kids “animals”, too, Mein Trumper?
It may be that Grpfr. Miller is the architect of Der Trumper’s child separation strategy. But with a complicit American Naz…er, Repub Congress, there will never be an investigation into Trumper’s Kiddie Kamps, so we’ll never know. Hell, we’ll never know if the policy has actually been stopped, or if any percent of the child prisoners ever are returned to their parents.
I just want to highlight how very low 58% approval is from the Republican base for a raw meat-type action by their President.
I mean, I share your horror that 20 million+ Americans are fine with Trump kidnapping brown kids, but this is the sort of voter response which is most likely to lead to electoral disaster for Republicans.
But to make that likelihood a reality, everybody on this blog needs to put their actions where their mouths are and join millions more participating in phone banks, precinct walks and other campaign contributions, even if their favorite Democrats don’t make it to the ballot.
The New Nazi Party is planning the explicit liquidations of those they view as their opponents. After the primaries are done, it will be necessary for all of us to put our ideological toys away.
ETTD (Everything Trump Touches Dies). He and his vampire demon policy advisor, Stephen Miller have approached illegal immigration in the least effective, most expensive and most morally depraved manner possible. Just take his Wall. Quite aside from it huge unpopularity among the Americans who would be most directly affected by it, the wall would be environmentally catastrophic and enormously costly – we’re talking many hundreds of billions of dollars and years and years to build never mind its maintenance. But being the spoiled brat that he is, he won’t give it up. ETTD.
Would Repubs ever have expected that Trump could lose the moral high ground to Michael Cohen?
They have run this game on us enough times that we should name it and call it out.
I’m sure it has a name within the current White House, but let’s just call it “Make Something Worse”. Faced with an extremely complicated system, a lack of expertise and curiosity, and a need for day to day attention, the administration never even tried to improve the federal government.
Their main play, from day one and the Muslim Ban, has been “Make Something Worse”. It runs like this:
1. Make Something Worse.
Pick a functioning area of the government, and break it. Don’t worry that the change will not withstand judicial review.
2. Show of Strength.
Shrug off reactions and insist that all consequences were actually intended. This phase is useful for tarnishing underlings by making them parrot implausible justifications, or resign.
3. Name your Price.
Try to exact concessions for return to the status quo ante. Lots of finger pointing here – make sure the fingers are pointed at weaker opponents.
4. Call a Press Conference.
Get some people to stand behind you. Try to get a win by any means. Most people will be relieved that the broken thing is being partially fixed. Use this to your advantage.
5. Make Something Else Worse.
Now you realize it doesn’t even matter what.
Here’s an analogy: Imagine that you have been given an iPhone and the mandate to improve it. On your desk is a product of millions of developer-hours overseen by an obsessive perfectionist. Your chances of actually improving it on a short timeline are nil.
Making it worse, though, that’s easy. Many things will slow it down, jam up its sensors, or render it useless.
Now imagine that your changes immediately propagate to everyone’s iPhone. You could get plenty of attention running this play. It could even distract large news organizations from their ongoing investigations.
And that’s really the only game they have left.
Tariffs.
North Korea.
Immigration.
Health Care.
G7 Relationships.
Recognize the Play. Call it out.
I think that it’s even worse than that, firefly.
These are tactical actions. They are means to a strategic end, and the aim is for Trump and his allies to break the government and take over. It’s as simple as that. Steve Bannon has said as much many, many times. Too many times, which is probably the main reason that he got ousted…if indeed he really was. As in any other war, it is not a good tactic to broadcast your real aims. They are breaking the government in a thousand small ways. Beware a forced government closing over the Trump wall or some other excuse. Once it’s closed, it may never open again.
This is not some sort of political contretemps; it is an attempt at a slow-moving coup. Both parties are at risk, as is the form of government now in effect.
AG
Yet more evidence that Arthur Gilroy is a Trump supporter. AG has been calling over and over again for a complete tear-down of the two political Parties and our current governing structures. Arthur has wanted to break the government and remake it in his obscure image for many years now, and here Trump is trying to do it. He’s excited about what is happening. It’s quite evident in the tone of his writings on this subject.
As to whether Arthur is a real opponent of Trump’s open attempts to install white supremacist policies, let’s note that he hasn’t offered any criticism at all of the current immigration enforcement policies, and let’s recall that Arthur has repeatedly defended his position that African-Americans were better off when Jim Crow laws and social practices were in effect.
I wasnt aware of some of most of this, and even though Arthur seems strange and often random, sometimes unaware of what he implies, and certainly not interested in taking responsibility for anything he says, i find it hard to believe.
Can you link to when he has said these things, especially the Jim Crow defense?
I do not have the time or interest to wade through Arthur’s voluminous comments and diaries to find his repeated defenses of these positions of his.
These are his positions. He’s made them crystal clear. He is red hot to reduce or eliminate many key pillars of Federal laws and regulations. For example, Arthur has claimed repeatedly that African-Americans were better off when they had their own segregated neighborhoods, businesses and schools.
Arthur’s a Ron Paul evangelist, so these views of his are not remarkable in the face of that idolatry.
Another fiercely held position of AG’s is his view that unemployment insurance is bad policy because it saps the initiative of beneficiaries. Lord knows where that places his views of other social insurance and welfare programs.
Arthur whaled away at the ACA during Obama’s Presidency, and has not raised a peep as the Trump Administration has repealed or undermined laws and regulations meant to protect the physicial and financial health of Americans with middle and lower incomes.
A group…perhaps better, a cadre…of people on this site have tried everything in their power to discourage criticism of the Democratic Party as it stands today. They automatically downrate such posts and have endlessly attacked several posters as liars, pro-Trump trolls and/or spreaders of Russian propaganda. When effectively rebutted, they simply ignore the rebuttal and repeat the same attacks. This tactic is intended to exhaust the patience of the attacked posters and discourage others from reading or posting similar material. It has worked on a few posters, who have simply given up. It has not worked on me. I initially answered their attacks with attempts at reason. After realizing that this was a total waste of time, I simply stopped replying to them. My comments and articles on this site are my replies. Read what I have to say; consider what they have to say and how it is said, and then make up your own minds. Thank you-AG
What you say hardly makes sense most of the time, sure it has some truths in it, noone is always wrong, but it doesnt seem to have much consistency and doesnt stand up to scrutiny. It looks as if you understand that, as you dont dare to engage criticism by defending things you say, but rather be dismissive and attack others instead.
You are not a serious person AG, if you disagree and would like to go into my thoughts of why i think that, i hope you can do better as the last time we had a chat.
But likely you wouldnt get past your idiosyncratic behavior, and perhaps are unable to look at how you are perceived and just think everyone who dares to criticize you are a bunch of idiots.
What you write here seems more projection than any reasonable criticism.
link
link
*P.S. I am going to add the following statement to many of my replies to your “standalone articles” (LOL!) and comments…for the benefit of new readers here. It applies to the comment that replies to as well:
*[ref.]